The W3C Want Your Feedback

Let’s be honest: few of us spend much time on the W3C website excitedly pouring over the latest guidelines and specifications. The documents and the design itself are probably best described as functional rather than attractive.

However, last month the W3C launched a new beta version of their website that incorporates a fresher, clearer, more modern design. The redesign aims to:

make it easier to locate the information you require

create a consistent page navigation

follow the conventions used by other websites

make previously hidden content easier to find

provide aggregated community information

improve rendering on mobile devices (train journeys will never be boring again!)

ensure pages meet WCAG 2.0 guidelines

improve maintenance, and

adopt technologies such as RSS.

It’s best not to expect whizzy graphics and animated widgets, but the new design is certainly an improvement on their increasingly dated website.

Do you like it? Will it persuade you to eagerly visit the site every day? Do you hate it? Does the blue and grey design make you ill? The W3C is looking for feedback from the web development community regarding the design, usability and any other aspect of the website.

Craig is a freelance UK web consultant who built his first page for IE2.0 in 1995. Since that time he's been advocating standards, accessibility, and best-practice HTML5 techniques. He's written more than 1,000 articles for SitePoint and you can find him @craigbuckler

Wardrop

It definitely looks more appealing, and while ironically, the old website was one of the worst I’d seen, the new site doesn’t improve on it all that drastically from a usability perspective. After first landing on the home page, I’m still immediately lost. An absolute information overload (like a lot of other popular sites surprisingly). There’s stuff everywhere, I don’t know where to look, and when I finally find the menu, I soon discover there’s another menu just to confuse me even further. I’m being very negative, yes, but come on, these guys develop the standards, let’s see them use their standards in a elegant and very functional way.

Guillem

Way better than the prior one, but I agree with Wardrop. It’s still too easy to get lost.

The main page is a bit of a mess. Using Firefox 3 i see following: Why is that “Web for All” section down there? Why do you have 2 “About W3C” links? The separation between the blogs on the right side and the “story” part in the middle is not clear. Etc., etc.

Granted, it may be a question of taste, but I find it confuse. It gets better, though, when you go into some random section.

http://www.clanspace.com.au Robbo89

I agree with everything Wardop said, they need to put more work into the useability.

http://www.historycommons.org/ Black Max

Man, it’s like they’ve designed a site to illustrate how not to design an information/content site….

Patrik

I also had some trouble to find the menu at the first sight. Jeez, come on. And what about that 100% width of the page? It’s really annoying me (have a large screen) to have such a large viewport of reading text.